Fantastic Lands and Where to Find Them: On Anthony Bale’s “A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages”
Anthony Bale | A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes | Viking | February 2023 | 448 Pages
Traveling is a pain: lost luggage, overbooked hotels, disappointing destinations. In Elective Affinities, Goethe’s heroine Ottilie elects to experience it secondhand: “She would take out a travel-book and let herself be rocked by the waves and read and dream herself into a far country.” If not preferable, reading travel narratives is at least a pleasure of its own. In his new book A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, medievalist Anthony Bale compresses an enormity of pre-Age of Discovery journeys into one period-spanning itinerary. He even replicates the little boxed inserts (“don’t miss” “be aware” “behave like a local”). But Fodor’s Travel Guide (or whatever listicle Google suggests) is not exactly considered top shelf for a historian, so why present one’s scholarly work in the genre? To show what we are missing? The modern travel guide is a frequently dismissed form of writing—one that seems ripe for AI replacement—but it also opens up otherwise arcane material, helping readers see how medieval dreamers might have experienced these texts and, conversely, urging them to forego presentism, thereby avoiding the finger wagging of today’s de-mystifiers.
In Marvelous Possessions, his 1991 study of “the wonder of the New World,” Stephen Greenblatt observed that “The discourse of travel in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance is rarely if ever interesting at the level of sustained narrative and teleological design, but gripping at the level of the anecdote.” Bale seems to have taken this idea to heart: the guidebook format allows him to be wonderfully digressive. He notes the (alleged) punishment for urinating in a yurt (“If you do this voluntarily, you’ll be put to death. If it’s accidental, you’ll have to pay a sorcerer to cleanse you”), quotes Simone Sigoli who, on visiting the pyramids, remarked, “Just imagine the very great amount of corn that could be placed inside,” and records Ma Huan’s delightfully optimistic “Ten uses for Indian Coconuts.” Liberated from the need to follow any journey to its end, Bale can give a greater sense of what made the greatest destinations so great and the worst trips so terrible.
The route Bale’s travel guide follows is disjointed, with the first half of the book following the pilgrimage to Jerusalem undertaken by devout Christians. (A simple if dangerous one; as they say in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, “Jerusalem is easy to find, go to where the men speak Italian, then continue until they speak something else.”) The second half continues with the travelers who aimed for more distant vistas or, in some cases, for nowhere at all. The difference was often subtle. Bale notes “One could convert oneself from pilgrim to tourist, leaving the rigid logic of pilgrimage for something looser, freer, stranger.” Plus, with “a shadowy but powerful Christian ruler, a direct descendant of the African magus” named Prester John leading a mystical Christian Kingdom in either Africa or East Asia (both of which were also tied to the geographical location of earthly paradise) a journey into the unknown always had the potential to transform into a holy quest for Judeo-Christian sites.
The pilgrimage route, already a cottage industry in the fourteenth century, gets a bit of a drubbing. Bale notes, “There wasn’t a person in Jerusalem who didn’t profit—either in their soul or in their wallet—from Christ’s death.” Throughout the section he spends a great deal of time detailing the suffering and humiliation of pilgrims. Of Margery Kempe, a mother of fourteen who arguably wrote the first autobiography in English, he says:
As the band of travelers made their way to Constance, their bullying of Kempe became acute. They chastised her and abused her and embarrassed her in every place. They cut her gown short, so it came to just below the knee, and they made her wear a ridiculous white canvas smock.
And, in a prolonged section on Dorothea of Montau, descriptions of her continued victimization by her husband, the swordsmith Adalbrecht, veer into schadenfreude: Adalbrecht who understood “her devotion as a kind of wifely insolence” was prone to “beat and thump Dorothea.” We learn: “On one occasion, because she forgot to buy straw, he punched her chest and she spat blood for days afterwards.” This was a typical beating for D of M; Bale describes several. Why? He notes that “Penitence and the cure of one’s soul was one of the main motivations for travel in the Middle Ages. A pilgrimage, if done properly, was far from a holiday but rather an act of self-punishment and self-reform.” With self-flagellation as a goal, Bale seems to feel that the outsize portion of suffering heaped upon pilgrims is just desserts.
For some, Bale’s harshness may veer into the tasteless or unpalatable, but the dry British flipness with which he treats his subjects juxtaposes nicely with the expected sanctity of the cloistered medievalist. If you find him funny, Bale’s sniping of travel writers can be quite lively. He takes aim at their stylistic shortcomings: Marco Polo, for example, is “pedantic, prosaic and unreliable,” Afanasiy Nikitin records a “disorderly narrative comprising various notes and reminiscences,” and Nicolò Conti “combines utterly prosaic descriptions of each town’s circumference with flights of fancy.” Nor do they get a pass for their foolishness: “Margery Kempe, upon first seeing Jerusalem during her pilgrimage of 1414, was so overcome with ‘joy and sweetness’ that she nearly fell off her ass.” He even mocks their naive confusion of delirium with transcendence:
Perhaps the pilgrims cried less out of joy than out of relief that their arduous journey had brought them to their destination. Given the long, sweaty, uncertain voyage they had undertaken, their guts roiling and their nerves frayed, is it any wonder that the sight of Jerusalem was a comfort?
Bale’s aim in this book is to write in a rigorous and entertaining way about medieval travel writing; it would be a disservice to the subject to exclude the fictitious or the tasteless. As our guide through the readings, he makes a game effort to cover modern sensitivities. We discuss the importance of sex work, dutifully consider racism and anti-semitism, learn about the origins of the Romani, and, in a wonderful section, read some East-to-West travelogues. But, there is no punishing salvo of postmodernism preceding the text instructing us of the evil and wrong and wickedness which these travel writings would bring.
Following a quote from an Elizabeth Bishop poem in the preface, Bale’s commitment to the book’s medieval grounding is absolute, even to the exclusion of relevant and interesting connections to later periods. He has subtitled the book “The World Through Medieval Eyes” and he stands by the blinkering. Early on, Bale tells of the travels of one Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby who had “taken part in a violent rebellion against his cousin the king, Richard II.” A rebellion which “started a cycle of vicious revenge killings.” Bale dutifully notes the entire itinerary that Bolingbroke brought with him on a crusade of Barbary down to the number of hides (six) and new horses (also six). What he neglects to mention is that this rebellion is dramatized in one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays (“Richard II”), as are the revenge killings in two even better ones (“King Henry IV” pt. 1 & 2). Bale is both our expert on the medieval world and the sole modern interpretative voice. He allows no exceptions, even for Shakespeare. In contrast, in the first few pages of Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions you’ll be urged to think of Walter Benjamin, reflect on the work of Homi Bhabha, and recall Charles Bronson’s performance in Death Wish 2.
This is a notable exclusion. Less for the kind of pop culture point scoring you get with Death Wish 2 (or me quoting Kingdom of Heaven), than for omitting popular narratives in modern academic discourse about early East-West encounters. The scholars that Bale ignores, from Said to Spivak, include people who might point to the various medieval tidbits he compiles as being, well, evil—or at least less than delightful. In Orientalism, Said argues that: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.” When Mandeville claimed that “Ethiopia was home to the sciapods, humans with only one very large foot who could hop about at wondrous speed,” he was contributing to a discourse of self and other, of center and periphery, of West and East, of civilized and uncivilized. Like all in Mandeville, it was salacious nonsense—as Bale says of Mandeville’s real world exploration, “the main place from which he departed was the realm of truth”—but influential nonsense too: Columbus often cited Mandeville’s Travels as having sparked his interest in exploration.
Audiences used to academic writing will likely be relieved that Bale has spared them the scholarly infighting and inevitable rebuttals—and Bale, a professor, has spared himself from defending the ethics of his interest—but might a casual reader lose out on, at the very least, the novelty of his project? Having set aside all other authorities, Bale grants himself the kind of gravitas with which travel guides were often received in the Middle Ages—he is to us what Marco Polo was to any given Spice Merchant. This both liberates the text and limits it. We can love the total medieval immersion, but might still want to see Bale, who tweets under the handle @RealMandeville, go to bat for the travel writers. His clean-up act certainly is the way of the guidebook (one wouldn’t expect a guide to, say, Saudi Arabia to question the ethics of a visit) but I think the exclusion is more than a concession to form.
He notes at one point that “many medieval travelers articulated a Christian, European judgmentalism, a supercilious and composting hatred, that would become the hallmark of later western tourists.” When he says this, what is he implying? What about what came in between? Bale’s book is such a success, both as a celebration of the beauty, wonder, and wrongheadedness of early travel writing, and of the value of an informative stylish guide to what for most will be unmapped territory, that one wonders why he’d be so deliberately withholding. There is, after all, room between a footnoted historiography of coconuts and simply letting us know what Ma Huan thought you did with them.